


Far East

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Asano Gakuhou's Bad Parenting, Changelings, Domestic Fluff, Dysfunctional Family, Fairy Tale Elements, Family Dynamics, Fantasy, Gakuhou is very mean, Gen, Help, Here is where the tags get weird, High School, Humor, M/M, Magical Realism, Post-Canon, Siblings, Time Skips, What Have I Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29003538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: Gakushuu Asano runs into Karma on Friday morning. “Can you help me find my brother?”Written for Karushuu Week 2021 on Tumblr!
Relationships: Akabane Karma/Asano Gakushuu, Asano Gakuhou & Asano Gakushuu, Asano Gakushuu & Original Character(s), Asano Gakushuu & Sakakibara Ren
Comments: 19
Kudos: 103





	Far East

**Author's Note:**

> It's day 2 of [Karushuu Week 2021](https://karushuu--week.tumblr.com/post/639125461973254144/2021-prompts) my friends and I'm sorry for writing this.

_[Karushuu Week 2021](https://karushuu--week.tumblr.com/post/639125461973254144/2021-prompts) _

_Day 2: Parents/Siblings_

**Looks like life threw you in for a bellcurve**

Gakushuu Asano runs into Karma on Friday morning. “Can you help me find my brother?”

The boy that runs into Karma Akabane as he’s on his usual route to school one friday morning is not Gakushuu Asano.

He certainly looks like Gakushuu Asano, with his blonde hair and angled eyes and the deep-set scowl on his lips, but at the same time there’s something not quite right with him, like he’s just fallen shy into the uncanny valley of almost passing for Gakushuu Asano, with his bangs swept in the opposite direction and the line of his jaw not quite as hard, his nose not quite right and his voice not quite the same and his eyes the color of hazel brown instead of Gakushuu Asano’s signature, glittering, haunting violet.

Karma takes a few large steps back to put distance between himself and this unsettling imitation.

Not-quite-Gakushuu looks startled, and then contrite, and then smiles sheepishly at Karma in a very un-Gakushuu like manner. “Um… I’m sorry for startling you.”

Karma doesn’t answer. That is not Gakushuu’s voice, and not Gakushuu’s demeanor. 

His hand tightens around the phone in his pocket, he wonders if he can blind-text Gakushuu (the real one).

Disconcertingly, Not-Gakushuu smiles a little bit more. “Your name is Karma, right?” He folds his hands in front of him. “You can call me Jiro. I’m sure you know Gakushuu… I’m his brother.”

That’s a lie, because Gakushuu doesn’t have a brother… does he?

“If you are who you say you are,” Karma says slowly, “then what do you mean, help you find him?”

“Ah…” Not-Gakushuu (Jiro?) tilts his head. “I ran out of our house, and I don’t want to go back right now. I know he’s at school, but I don’t know where that is… but you do, right? Can you bring me to him?”

Karma looks down at his clothes - casual home wear, then up at Jiro’s face. “You’re not a student.”

“Ah… no…” 

“Fine,” Karma says curtly. “Follow me.”

“Thank you, Karma!”

For some reason, his name coming out of not-Gakushuu’s mouth sends a chill up his spine. It’s so… foreign. “Don’t call me Karma.”

For some reason, that makes Jiro smile more.

Jiro doesn’t bother making small talk, following Karma like a silent shadow. And Gakushuu is the same way, terrifyingly so, even with Karma’s assassin training and honed instincts, Gakushuu is always a little bit too quick and a little bit too quiet for Karma to catch. It unnerves Karma, then, to have Jiro the same way, footsteps featherlight.

Karma was planning to stop by a convenience store on the way to school but he abandons that plan now and heads to Kunugigaoka High with strides twice as large. 

The moment he comes into view of the other students, they stop to gape at him in wordless shock. Karma ignores all of them, and beelines towards the 1-A classroom.

He practically kicks the door off its hinges. 

“Gakushuu!” 

Jiro calls out, and Gakushuu - from where he’s seating - springs to attention, head snapping up from his book. 

Karma, and the rest of the 1-A students, stare unabashedly.

“Gakushuu!” Jiro bounds over, and Gakushuu stands up to receive him. 

“Jiro, what are you doing here?”

“I was walking around the neighborhood, but I got lost. Then I followed- uh, I ran into him.”

Jiro turns to point at Karma.

Gakushuu shoots him a questioning gaze. Karma shrugs.

Then Gakushuu asks, “does your father know you’re out?”

All members of 1-A, who at this point are still tactfully trying to pretend they’re not eavesdropping, drop those pretenses. They lean in a little bit.

Jiro winces. “Ah… not really...” 

Gakushuu frowns. “You should go back. I’ll give you directions. I’ll walk you to the gate.”

Jiro looks at Gakushuu (Gakushuu is a little taller than him), and frowns in what could almost be a mirror image of his (based on how they interact, Gakushuu must be older?) brother, and sags. “Okay, fine.”

Gakushuu walks out of the classroom and Jiro follows him.

At the beginning of the third year of their middle school, when the moon blows up into a crescent and a giant yellow octopus becomes 3-E’s homeroom teacher.

The events of the happenings of the classroom on the hill culminate into the backlash of Kunugigaoka’s tyrannical governing system. The dam breaks when Gakuhou Asano slaps his son across the room, and publicly disowns him in front of his middle school classroom. 

By the time the first bell rings, everybody and their cousin knows that Gakushuu Asano has a younger/twin brother, Jiro (Asano?). 

The intricacies of their family dynamics are unknown and Gakushuu himself seems adamant at answering anything. What happened? How did whatever that happened, happen? 

Ren Sakakibara is uncomfortable at it all, but for some reason he doesn't seem shocked, so it tells Karma that he must know something about it, moreso than him and moreso than the other Virtuosos. 

Not that Karma is jealous or anything, because Ren is his best friend. He's his childhood friend, so if Gakushuu had a brother, surely only he would know about it. Not like Gakushuu doesn't keep secrets from everyone including his boyfriend rival, so what's there for Karma to be a little hurt and confused and jealous about?

During lunch that day Gakushuu says, to the room at large, "that was my twin brother."

1-A, fearful that inane commentary might cause Gakushuu to change his mind about speaking, remain silent as they vibrate eagerly in their seats.

"When my parents split, my mother took him and moved to another country. He's back now as my mother is out of commission."

Gakushuu sits back down, and gossip starts up again.

Gakushuu is lying. 

Karma can't tell from Gakushuu that he himself is lying, but he can tell from Ren's face that Gakushuu is. 

But Karma doesn't actually get to ask Gakushuu about it, because he makes himself scarce when lesson ends, no doubt to attend to one of his multitudes of after-school commitments. Karma tries not to be bummed out about it (he is) and he refrains from asking over text because he wants to be a good boyfriend rival and respect boundaries and if Gakushuu wants to tell him, he would, right?

Some time later when Gakushuu is over at Karma’s house (he comes over to Karma’s house a lot), Gakushuu is the one that brings it up. “You’re not going to ask me about Jiro?”

“Should I?” Karma says, aiming for casual, his heart beating with excitement in his chest. 

Gakushuu looks over at him (he’s leaning against the kitchen island as Karma busies himself at the stove) for a beat, humming. Then he says, “you’re hurt that I would hide such a big thing from you, confused about why I would even bother to hide it, jealous that Ren knows but not you… and a little unnerved by how I’m saying all these.”

“Fine, you little mind reader,” Karma huffs. “Yes, yes I am to all of that.”

Gakushuu opens his mouth.

“But you don’t have to tell me anything,” Karma says quickly, and Gakushuu looks surprised. “I didn’t ask because there’s obviously a lot of, um, family stuff that I’m not about to pry in unnecessarily. Ren knows but sure he does, he’s your best friend and he’s known you since you were, what, seven? If anyone knows you have a sibling, it’d be him.”

And besides, it’s not like Karma to be a hypocrite. He himself has not spilled all the deep dark secrets of why he lives alone in this house (why his parents up and left him), it’s not something that he wants to revisit, even if it’s to talk to someone he cares about. He doesn’t expect Gakushuu to do the same. 

Gakushuu settles into a happy sort of hum that makes Karma’s heart flutter in his chest. The tip of his fingers tingle, as it always does when Gakushuu is around, and Karma feels weightless when Gakushuu nuzzles against his cheek. 

“Thank you. I’ll tell you everything when I’m ready.”

At some point Jiro shows up on Karma’s doorstep, bouncing on his toes with a bit of childlike curiosity that makes him look a lot younger than he actually is. How are he and Gakushuu the same age, Karma wonders, when Gakushuu drifts so far away sometimes he seems much older than seventeen. He supposes it’s because of their different upbringing, and if what Gakushuu said about his childhood is to be believed (which Karma honestly doesn’t really believe at all), Karma really wonders what kind of woman that their mother is. 

Jiro had poked around Karma’s house with an incredulous expression before he turns around and says, “you spend so much time here, Gakushuu,” and Gakushuu clamps his hand over Jiro’s mouth.

Jiro squeaks, and wriggles out of Gakushuu’s grip. “I’m just saying! This is where you go whenever you’re not at home, right? I’m glad you’re not like, sleeping in a tree or something.”

Gakushuu rolls his eyes. “Why would I sleep in a tree?”

Karma looks over his own sitting room curiously. “Is it obvious that Gakushuu is here?”

“Well, yeah,” Jiro says, “I sense him everywhere!”

Gakushuu steps on Jiro’s foot.

Karma raises an eyebrow. “All his stuff is in his room - uh, guest room.”

“Yeah, right,” Jiro nods, “what I mean is, um, this place looks very lived in.”

“It’s very clean,” Karma says.

“That’s lived-in standards for Gakushuu.”

Karma can’t refute that.

Gakushuu says over dinner, “The only reason Ren knows is because he visited my house and Jiro answered the door.”

“I remember that,” Jiro says, laughing. “He looked at me and said, who the fuck are you?”

“You two look nothing alike,” Karma points out.

Twin blonde heads snap in his direction with creepy simultaneity. 

“It’s true,” Karma says. 

Jiro and Gakushuu exchange a weighted look, before Jiro says, “I look more like our mother.”

“Gakushuu is practically a copy of Gakuhou,” Karma hums. “Apart from, like, the eyes, of course.”

“What about his eyes?” Jiro snaps so suddenly, that Karma’s taken aback. 

“What?!” Karma straightens up quickly. “Nothing! I like them!”

He realizes what he said belatedly, but Gakushuu’s face is already pink. Jiro is snickering, the hostility gone as quickly as it appeared, looking between Karma and his brother with a salacious grin on his face.

Karma learns more about Jiro, who shares similarities with Gakushuu in appearances and their distaste for their biological father and pretty much nothing else, he finds out. Jiro is an Asano, he is homeschooled, he is failing in his subjects (which is why he’s homeschooled), and he apparently has a crush on Sakakibara Ren, to which Karma finds out over an autumn evening when they have three bottles of sake between them. 

When did Karma’s house become a rendezvous for the Asano twins?

“He was the first human that was nice to me,” Jiro says a little nonsensically, and Gakushuu excricates the bottle from his hands.

“No, give it back!”

“I’m pouring you a shot,” Gakushuu says. Karma watches him top up a shot glass with water.

“Gimmie,” Jiro says, and tips it down his throat. “That’s so strong!”

“Mhm,” Gakushuu says. “Have another one.”

“Ahh!” Jiro flops over Gakushuu, boneless. 

Gakushuu exchanges an exasperated look with Karma.

“How did you get these, anyways?” Karma says. “They didn’t check for ID?”

Gakushuu shrugs. 

It’s 2am in the morning, Karma is buzzed, Jiro is snoozing in Gakushuu’s bedroom guest room (he’s been there for an hour). Gakushuu says that at the very least Jiro could do a lot worse than Ren and Ren could do a lot worse than Jiro, and Karma on too liquid courage asks Gakushuu if he had a crush on anybody. 

Then Karma finds out that Gakushuu tastes like alcohol and fruity peach, and that his hair really is as soft to touch as it looks, and the lip gloss Gakushuu wears has a little tint to it.

Karma lets Gakushuu push him onto his bed and crawl over him, Gakushuu lets Karma take off his shirt and put his hands all over his back, and Gakushuu-

“What the fuck?”

Gakushuu opens his eyes. “Mhm?”

“I’m too drunk. I’m hallucinating.” Karma closes his eyes and opens them again and yeah, his ceiling looks funny. “I’m going to sleep.”

Gakushuu looks amused. He looks pretty. “Go to sleep, Karma.”

“You too,” Karma says, tugging his arm. “You should do cosplay. You look very pretty in cosplay, I think.”

Gakushuu’s eyes widen, like he’s just realized something. Maybe he forgot to submit homework or something - hah! As if.

Karma, hungover, steps into his kitchen in the morning. Ren is there, Jiro is there, Gakushuu is there.

“What the fuck?” Karma says. 

It starts fourteen years ago when Gakushuu Asano vanishes without a trace.

“I’m sorry,” Karma says, head spinning, partly because of the hangover, partly because of… everything else. “Say that again.”

When Gakuhou Asano and his wife are roused from their bed to the sound of their newborn crying, it takes one look at the infant in the cot for them to know that it’s not theirs. 

The pale violet eyes that glow in the moonlight is the first indicator that whatever is in the cot is not human, but a baby’s cry is a baby’s cry. Even as they pass the child between them in an attempt to soothe it and hold it at arm’s length, the missus hovering behind her husband as he rifles through files and books and clicks through internet searches, when the dawn breaks light and they both call in for emergency leave at their workplaces, and the baby that is not theirs does not stop crying.

Over the next two days as they deliberate bringing it to the doctor, the infant who should not have teeth yet rip the skin of the missus with needle-teeth way too sharp to be human, babbles something in a foreign tongue that despite all of Gakuhou’s knowledge he does not know, and on a whim Gakuhou grabs an iron magnet off the refrigerator and presses it to the child’s skin and it begins to blister.

“A changeling.”

Karma looks at Jiro. “You-”

“I’m the original.” 

His eyes, brown and startlingly _normal_ the way Gakushuu’s never were, stare into Karma. 

“You,” Karma looks from him, to Ren, to Gakushuu. “Is this a joke?”

Gakushuu looks meaningfully at Karma. The butterfly wings - fey wings? On his back, shimmer in the sunlight streaming through the windows. They’re iridescent, they’re translucent, they beat a blast of air into Karma’s face to wake him up.

“So… I wasn’t hallucinating last night.”

Gakushuu shakes his head. He’s biting his lip.

“So...:”

“So?” Jiro prompts, when Karma’s been silent for a bit too long. 

Karma’s brain is firing so many shots at once, that as a defense mechanism, his body decides to shut it down. It’s only because his brain is not working that Karma latches on to his most recent memory and says, in the true note of hysterical incredulity, “your wings cockblocked me.”

Jiro starts choking. Ren slaps him on the back. Gakushuu turns flaming red. “What?!”

“I was going to go down on you last night,” Karma says, pointing an accusing finger. “But I saw your wings and figured that I was too drunk out of my mind that I was hallucinating, so I decided to go to sleep. If I knew they were real, I would have known I was sober enough to-”

Gakushuu smacks him in the face with another beat of air to shut him up.

“I’m on the opposite side of the situation, taken from the human realm and brought to the fey court, but now I’m back here,” Jiro says. “It’s not as rare as it seems, because humans taken as changelings can be released based on various circumstances. Most people just never find out because they don’t have the means to.”

“How did you guys find out, then?” Karma says.

“Gakushuu found me.” Jiro nods towards his… brother? They are brothers, kinship wise. Bloodwise, Gakushuu’s apparently not even human. “I was spat out of a fey portal in south America. I couldn’t even speak the language, so I was put in an orphanage. He found me - one person in seven billion. He taught me Japanese and about the world. He told me how much my family was waiting for me and he made me feel like I was loved and wanted for the first time in my life. It doesn’t matter that our father is being an asshole about it all, Gakushuu is and will always be family.”

Gakushuu blushes a little. “Jiro…”

“It’s true,” Jiro insists. “Dad’s being purposefully obtuse right now. He really does care for Gakushuu, even though he’s stubborn about being in denial he doesn’t! He-” 

Ren elbows him. Jiro frowns at him, but sags at Gakushuu’s expression. 

Karma quickly changes the subject. “So, Gakushuu, can you do magic?”

Gakushuu tilts his head. “Yes, but I don’t like using it.”

Jiro nods enthusiastically. “He’s plenty amazing without magic already”

“Can _you_ do magic?”

“Oh, no!” Jiro shakes his head. “I’m human, through and through. I’ve picked up some stuff during my time in Fey Court, so I can’t do magic myself, but I’ve learnt about it, anyways. Since I loved my whole life with magic... I have some sort of feel for it, I guess, but that's about it.”

“Being confined to the human realm doesn’t give me much opportunities for magic,” Gakushuu says. “The only form of magic that comes distinctively to Fey is Glamour. It’s the simplest and most instinctive form of magic that allows us to look human.”

“And yet you lost control over it last night,” Jiro points out cheekily.

“I- shut up!”

It’s one of those times when Gakushuu’s not around but Jiro and Ren somehow are, that Jiro asks Karma about the past.

“Gakushuu won’t tell me himself, which I understand,” Jiro says, “and father won’t speak of it either, but I want to know what happened.”

“We know pretty much most of it,” Ren tells Jiro, hand on his shoulder. “Gakuhou, bad, studies, Ikeda. Basic stuff.”

Karma nods.

“Another reason Gakuhou hates Gakushuu is because Gakushuu is… well, not his son.”

That part, Karma understands with growing clarity. “He resents Gakushuu for losing Jiro.”

“He called Gakushuu only by their last name because he’s not the real Gakushuu,” Ren says, “and after he disowned him, Gakuhou only called him by… well... I heard boy a few times, brat as well. Sometimes parasite.”

Karma glowers. “I want to punch him in his stupd fucking-”

“Asa- Gakushuu.”

Karma wants to bite his tongue. Gakushuu looks at him, and the rest of 3-E, eyebrow raised and arms crossed and a fresh bandage on his cheek. “Congratulations,” he drawls. “You’ve really made your _mark_.”

His classmates exchange uncomfortable looks. Isogai winces and says, “I’m sorry that… ah, that happened. If there’s anything we can do-”

“Thank you, but no thank you, 3-E,” Gakushuu says smoothly. “I think you’ve all done enough today, hm? You’ve definitely made quite an impression on Kunugigaoka.”

“Your father was up at our classroom just now,” Isogai says, because that’s what they came to tell Gakushuu about, after hearing about the whole incident in the 3-A classroom, because he deserved to know, at the very least. “He-”

“I don’t think what he does is any of my concern,” Gakushuu cuts in, words a bitter edge. “After all, he’s made it very clear what he thinks of me.”

“Do you have anywhere to go?” It surprises Karma, when he realizes who asks this question. Kayano, who steps out from behind Isogai, a sympathetic look on her face, and it’s then Karma realizes she too (like himself, now like Gakushuu) has no family left to speak of. 

Gakushuu too looks surprised. “Oh. Yes. He didn’t kick me out.”

“You’re still staying with him?”

Gakushuu looks… he looks tired, and Karma’s struck with the realization that this isn’t his first time having this conversation. This disowning must not have been on a whim, then. It must have been a matter long discussed, enough that Gakushuu must have spent a long time deliberating over the options. “As a tenant, now, out of courtesy,” Gakushuu says, and he sounds defeated. “No where else to go.” 

Before Kayano - or anyone else - says anything, Gakushuu turns around and leaves.

“Gakuhou wouldn’t have let him go anywhere,” Jiro points out. “Gakushuu was the last link he had to the fey world, which was the last link he had to me.”

They’re in the same class in Kunugigaoka High School, 1-A. Gakushuu - he’s just Gakushuu now, no more Asano, and no mother’s maiden name to speak of, either. It’s still registered in the system as Asano, but nobody calls him that, and the teachers know better than to say it. Karma doesn't know a single thing of what to do but it seems like all of their old schoolmates are perfectly content sidestepping it all.

Gakushuu seems… different, not that Karma expected him to stay the same. He’s still behaving as he was, flitting through life with a disarming smile and steadfast work ethic, although he’s a lot more distractible now, and Karma catches him staring into blank space.

There are large blocks of time he cannot be found, and those times are hard to ignore when someone comes knocking on the classroom door but nobody remembers his schedule from the many arrangements he makes and none of the calls go through. 

Everyone worries, and Karma has to admit he worries too, because even if he didn’t feel much for Gakushuu then it was just a normal human thing to feel concern over someone you know - people feel compassion for complete strangers, and humans are social animals, so your eyes are just naturally drawn to watch out for those in your community. 

It maybe starts from there, because Karma’s still legally an Akabane but his birth parents never cared about him like they thought he still is. And sometimes Kayano asks after Gakushuu, so Karma thinks about him more and more, and maybe he thinks he knows what it’s like to be tossed aside and left behind by someone who was supposed to take care of you and be family.

"Gakushuu," Karma says, the name feeling foreign on his tongue.

"So we're paired for the project," Gakushuu hums, as he takes a seat next to Karma. "I trust you understand the material, Akabane, because-"

"Karma," Karma blurts, before he can stop himself. 

Gakushuu looks at him.

Karma feels embarrassed at the sudden scrutinizing gaze. "Call me Karma."

Gakushuu stares at him for a while longer, an unreadable emotion flicking in his eyes, before he says, "alright. Karma."

“Ohh,” Jiro says, leaning in with a shit-eating grin on his face. “You gave him your name.”

“W- he already knows my name!” Karma says, heat rising to his face.

“Still, the act of offering is significant,” Jiro says, folding his hands behind his back. “It’s a marker of trust, and of commitment. I can see why he’s smitten with you.” There’s a twinkle in his eye when he says, “he talks about you, you know.”

Ren laughs, high and loud. 

Karma flusters. “Yeah, well.”

They do their joint project in the school library most days, after Gakushuu’s school commitments. It’s only one day when they realize they’ve stayed past school hours - the librarian comes to shoo them off with a pat on Gakushuu’s head - that Gakushuu admits he’s weary at the prospect of going back to his house.

They weren’t friends, yet, not really at the point. It’s two months into the new school year and they’re cordial enough as classmates, if being cordial means they don’t talk outside of the various assignments that their teacher sticks them together with because in their words, “you two are of a different caliber, pairing either of you with another student would be unfair to everyone.” So they do end up spending more time together.

And in that time Karma finds that Gakushuu is a… peaceful person to be around. There’s no right word to describe it, but when they’re not butting heads in academic debate, Gakushuu’s presence is… calming. Karma is notoriously bad at sitting still but he manages with better focus when Gakushuu is around, and he chalks it up to the boy’s work ethic actually being a - dare he say - good influence on him. 

Karma doesn’t mind Gakushuu being around.

So he says, “You can come to my place.”

Gakushuu looks at him.

“If you don’t mind,” Karma hastily corrects.

Gakushuu smiles at him. “I appreciate that, but I have matters to settle today.”

He ends up taking Karma up on the offer a week later, and he brings an overnight bag for one of the empty guest rooms in Karma’s house.

“Did he kick you out?” Karma says, in lieu of a greeting.

“He can’t kick me out, I pay rent.” Gakushuu sits stiffly at one end of Karma’s couch. “I just need a breather.”

Karma opens his kitchen cabinets and pulls out teabags. He flicks the kettle on. “Honestly, stay as long as you like.”

Strangely enough, even with a new person in the house, Karma has the best sleep he’s ever had in a long time.

“Are you going to tell me that me finally not having nightmares is a fey thing?” Karma says.

Jiro laughs. “Not the way I’d put it, but yes! I could feel it the moment I stepped into your house, he’s spent a lot of time there. Fey magic has a, well, it could be a pleasant sensation to humans, I suppose. When used maliciously, it lures people into a false sense of security and twists their minds for deception.”

“Is that why he’s so good at manipulation?” Ren asks, genuinely. Karma wants to know too.

“No, that’s all him,” Jiro says, and there’s a note of awe in his voice. “Dad talks circles around people on his own as a human being, and Gakushuu learns the same way. Gakushuu doesn’t quite know how to use his magic yet, and he certainly didn’t have opportunity as a kid - he’s not short of it, don’t get me wrong, he’s leaving passive traces everywhere.”

“Around me and my house, you mean?” Karma says, heat rising to his cheeks as he asks.

Jiro grins. “Uh huh.”

The conflict in the Asano household hits peak sometime before Gakushuu’s and Jiro’s eighteenth birthday. Gakushuu curls up in Karma’s bed at night.

“I wasn’t his son,” Gakushuu murmurs, “and he never forgave me for it… but he was my dad, you know? He was the only one I had.”

Karma doesn't know what to say so he says nothing. He wraps his arms around Gakushuu. 

“But what was I supposed to do? I didn’t make the choice to break his family up! I was an baby myself! What was I supposed to do?! Jiro’s mother left because she couldn’t handle me not being her real son and Gakuhou still won’t tell me her name because he thinks I don’t deserve to know and I did everything he wanted me to do but in the end he still threw me away and my birth parents also threw me away-”

“Gakushuu,” Karma says, helpless.

“-and I never used magic and I tried my best to be human so much because my birth parents want a human and dad wants a human but I’m never good enough, and Jiro says he doesn’t blame me but I know he’s lying because if I was just better then my birth parents wouldn’t have wanted him instead and without me, he would still have his mom and dad and his family who loved him-”

“Jiro doesn't hate you, he loves you,” Karma insists, but Gakushuu is so overwhelmed he’s sobbing, his wings are out and flapping like a tiny scared bird. 

Karma tugs him close, and presses Gakushuu to his chest, and lets Gakushuu cry there. “Ren loves you. I love you.”

“R-really?”

“Yeah!” Karma squeezes him. “I love you so much.”

Gakushuu sniffles. “Jiro’s outside.”

“What?”

The doorbell rings.

Karma stands up, leaving Gakushuu swaddled in blankets. “I’ll get it.”

“You’re going to ask Gakushuu to move in with you?” Jiro’s eyes are glittering. Despite the bleak situation (Gakushuu crying himself to sleep.)

“He’s here more often than not,” Karma says. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to go home, and I think Gakuhou’s looking for an excuse to kick him out.”

Jiro shakes his head. “Gakuhou actually wants him to stay.”

“...For what? To make him more miserable?”

“Because he actually loves Gakushuu and I think he’s finally starting to realize that,”Jiro says. “All it took was me telling him that I failed math again. _At least Gakushuu’s good at this_ , he says, and then it’s like the puzzle piece clicks and he receives enlightenment... But that’s not the point. And I don’t want Gakushuu to stay home, either. I know he would say yes to you.”

“I hope he will,” Karma says. “There’s room for you here, too.”

“I’m not going to intrude on the both of you,” Jiro says, shaking his head. He’s smiling. “I have to go back and make sure Dad’s still alive.” 

Jiro’s brought over some of Gakushuu’s things already, not that Gakushuu hasn’t moved half his belongings to Karma’s bit by bit over the past few years. “I’ve texted Ren. He’s dropping by tomorrow with breakfast for you two at 8. Then he’s coming by to help me yell at Dad. We’ll come by again in the afternoon with lunch.”

Karma nods. “Did you actually fail math again?”

Jiro winces a little. “Ah… on purpose? Seeing the kind of expectations Gakushuu went through, I’m not too keen on going the same route myself.”

“That’s fair,” Karma says.

“Go to bed,” Jiro says. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I hope you become my brother-in-law by then.”

“Wh- I’m asking him to move in, not get married!”

“Be more efficient and kill two birds with one stone.”

“ _Bye.”_

**Author's Note:**

> The name "Jiro" means second son.
> 
> I bet some of ya were expecting Hakuhou, huh. 
> 
> The concept of this story was from a long time ago, honestly, and I adapted it to write this! I've had different interpretations of fey Gakushuu, and I think this changeling idea sprung up during one of my conversations with Skye (as many of of my ideas do). The original idea takes place during canon events where 3-E are a bunch of conspiracy theorists because their student council president is a strange strange boy, Gakushuu finds Jiro, and maybe some mean scientist man decides to do bad science magic.  
> Perhaps one day I'll write that idea HAHAHA  
> It is incredibly refreshing to have written something for it though, even if I'm not the most satisfied with this fic. It would have ended up in my incomplete works otherwise.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
